


The Hand You're Dealt

by brawltogethernow



Series: strung along [3]
Category: Magic Kaito, 名探偵コナン | Detective Conan | Case Closed
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Cantrips & Shenanigans, Content Warning: Akako, Gen, Introspection, Nakamori Ginzo/the Concept of Kaitou Kid BroTP, Platonic Soulmates, Red String of Fate, Relationship Study, Witchcraft, Worldbuilding, or as much as you can make Kaito do which is not a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-29 04:23:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14464941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brawltogethernow/pseuds/brawltogethernow
Summary: Kid's true nemesis: Having too much time to think.





	The Hand You're Dealt

**Author's Note:**

> Three points:  
> This took four years.
> 
> I've somehow ended up with an AU where none of the movies are canon _except_ the _Lupin III_ crossovers.
> 
> This was supposed to be canon relationships per the series m.o., but instead it's torn between Kaito/everyone (which I ship) and Kaito/eternal loneliness until he’s crushed under an avalanche of his own subterfuge (which I don’t).

It was algebra. It was forty minutes into a double period of algebra, and _algebra_ was easy even when it wasn’t a review day, so you will excuse Kaito for zoning out staring at his own left hand. Look, he wasn’t a druggie or something, okay? _It was a weird_ _hand_. He was thinking deep thoughts. People could find better things to do with their time than judge him.

Kaito never really used to pay attention to his fate strings. But then he became Kid, and, like every other aspect of his life, they became very insane very quickly.

Kaito always used to be a big believer in making his own entertainment. (And everyone else’s entertainment, as allowed for by them being in the vicinity.) But no more! Lately it just came to him. It _almost_ made him want to start taking steps to avoid some of it, but then he remembered how easily he got bored. And hey, it wasn’t like he couldn’t _handle_ it.

His eyes shifted instinctively to a motion in the corner of his eye, and he found himself looking at Akako watching him with a knowing smirk, idly twirling her hair around one finger.

(Items arranged on Akako’s desk: Math textbook; completed worksheet; quarter-finished loose leaf of expected homework questions held down by a rock with a hole in it; four sticks of incense.)

If he knew that look, she was probably going to try to waylay him when the bell rang for lunch. Maybe if he went straight to the roof, he could ditch her?

He knew a lot of the reasons Akako acted like... _Akako_... must be because she was secretly lonely, having to forge all her own connections with no guarantees.

...That had been just a hunch during their first few confrontations, though. Scary. She still creeped him out, if he was being honest.

 

_“‘What has two hands but no soulmates?’” she quoted. An old riddle, for children. “‘A clock.’ ...Or a witch.”_

_“But miss,” he said, voice rough as he fought to keep it even and projected as he held himself up on his hands and knees. His blood dripped on the white, white snow, each drop burning through it hot and red before being swallowed. “Surely you’re mistaken? For I recall that some clocks have a red line.”_

 

The bright red second hand on the classroom clock stuttered along its rotation.

Who had two hands and needed a distraction? _This guy._ Mechanically, Kaito flicked a pack of playing cards out of his sleeve and into his hands and started running through trick shuffles. None of the teachers would even bring that up with him, at this point in the year. He had successfully skewed their personal metrics for what counted as “distracting the class” beyond all recognition.

Partway through stacking a flourishy overhand, his attempt at getting his mind on something else was already backfiring spectacularly, because he still wasn’t used to how skipping cards through his hands drew his attention to the frigging _light show_. He was used to _Aoko’s_ string being there to complement: It was almost the color of the red suits, a rich berry color that seemed to hum with warmth, and it had been clarified for over half his life.

But lately his hands were like a goddamn rave. Ugh, the strings were getting brighter in his vision because he was paying attention to them, ugh.

“Stupid kinda-magic,” he muttered, quietly, and made the cards vanish.

The clock he’d met Aoko under hadn’t had a second hand to mark a proverbial string, but there had been graffiti on it. It looked like a random messy swoop of red spray paint on the face, with clean gaps where it had passed over the hands in a couple places. Unless you were there at the right time, and then you could see it was a line connecting the two hands when they were at twelve and about a quarter to three. Real’ cute. For a while someone would redo the line every few years when it started to fade, so since the first time he’d seen it it had turned from a single swoop to a line surrounded by increasingly faded almost-overlapping echoes of itself, like it had been plucked to vibrate.

Then the mystery vandal stopped, and Kaito forgot about it.

Or he did until Aoko started looking _sad_ and making soulful puppydog eyes at the line whenever they were in the area as it slowly vanished from existence. And _that_ was how Kaito found himself hanging from a harness off the clock tower roof at three a.m. with a paintbrush and a can of cherry paint. And if he mixed a dash of blue into it so that it stirred into a rich raspberry, well, that was just because red products faded in the sun the fastest, and he was already less than pleased about prospectively having to maintain this building for the rest of his life, alright. It was efficient, that was all.

He was pretty sure she knew he was the one who had fixed it. They could both read each other all too well by now. Aoko had been the first one to see through him, of course. About the Kid thing. Honestly, he was surprised he had managed to keep her out of the loop for as long as he had. He had been starting to get complacent with it, actually—his ability to keep dodging her. But then it all fell apart at the clock tower heist, where it was basically impossible for her to miss the string that connected them by their ring fingers leading straight into the face of the clock under which they met. Nearby onlookers, had they been asked, would have reported that the young girl who had been standing in the crowd looking irate about the proceedings had suddenly shrieked like a banshee who’d been wronged and then torn off into the autumn night.

He’d feared the worst when Aoko found him out—fleeing the country under an assumed name, or, worse, the end of their friendship. She was the most important person in his life, even if they were both absolute shit at being sincere about anything for more than a few seconds.

Instead she’d become fervently... _in his corner._ It was insane. It was...

Really incredible. Better than he’d ever even dared think about. It felt like they were part of a group effort now; it was fantastic. It was like being in a _club._ It was like being in _cahoots._ It was the sort of camraderie they made shows for kids about.

First she chased him halfway across the city, though. It was…embarrassingly like one of their in-class scuffles.

The scuffles that kept some school days more engaging than this one. Now there was an idea. He looked over at her. She was taking notes, and did not look especially receptive to roughhousing. (Aoko did not need to be taking notes on an algebra review any more than he did, but she’d been told off for not looking busy too many times, and had gotten all twitchy about it.)

She noticed him considering her and looked up, raising her eyebrows to silently inquire what was going on with him. Is there trouble? Do you need something? Ready and stalwart and—just a little bit afraid that he was messing with her or about to take advantage of her concern, flickering in the creases around her eyes.

Great, now he felt like a shitty friend. He made a hand motion at her—no, all good. She narrowed her eyes warningly at him— Rude! Undeserved! —and turned back to the notes she didn’t need to take.

Sheesh.

The teacher moved around up at the front and Aoko’s dark blue eyes drifted up to the board and then stayed on it with the piercing, tranced-out attention of someone who could understand the topic at hand without expending any effort whatsoever. By the look of things, even if she weren’t being a slave to makework she couldn’t gossip with Keiko as she sometimes did. From the slightly edgy look in Aoko’s friend’s eyes, she actually needed the review day badly.

Maybe he would take them both out for cake today, or something.

...Though it looked a little like poor Keiko might better appreciate a tutor. He blamed the teacher, personally.

While the way their relationship had been growing tenser since he’d taken up being Kid had finally been resolved with Aoko, she was about the only one things were going so well with.

Things with _Hakuba_ got weirder the more normal they got with Aoko with an almost unreal degree of correlation. These days they were stuck in a kind of uneasy stasis. Back when the transfer student had really wanted to put Kaito away, he hadn’t been able to use the string that hooked him to Kaito middle finger to middle finger to get any real, straightforward evidence. There had been a series of increasingly farcical close calls, but he hadn’t made any progress to speak of. Now, he seemed kind of conflicted about it. Well, welcome to the conflicted party, buddy. Guests number two.

The thing about fate strings—and the reason Kaito wasn’t in jail, or on the run under a new identity forever—was that they weren’t considered evidence in legal procedures. Like lie detectors, but _worse_ , because whatever a person reported was something literally only they and one other person could see. You could absolutely lie your ass off about it, and people did. Couples could join forces to corroborate each others’ bullshit stories. People made up stories about strings that didn’t exist. Practically every country just threw up their hands and made it a legal non-issue. So if you, say, wanted to prove your connection was a wanted criminal and put him away forever for his crimes, you would still need more than your word for it.

Not that Hakuba couldn’t have kept outlining his suspicions to Division Two and at least thrown shade, but after his initial, soundly dismissed ravings, he seemed to have settled down and become determined to come back to back up his claims with _real_ evidence.

But then life just sort of kept happening, and Hakuba’s manic enthusiasm had died down to a...presence. He was himself. He was around. He explained Kaito’s tricks after the fact. He wasn't _doing_ anything.

Kaito really didn’t get the guy at all.

For some unknown detective intuition reason, Hakuba twitched his shoulders and then turned around and looked at Kaito. Kaito, startled by this but determined to charge forward before it could show, grinned cheerfully and deliberately waggled the fingers of his left hand at him. Hakuba scowled and hunched back over his math.

Wait, no, that wasn’t math. He had what looked like the day’s work and homework completed, stacked, and shoved to the side, the algebra textbook open on top of another, especially hefty textbook (looked like Geography), and a paperback open in front of them and just slightly under a ledge made by the math book, masked from the teacher by the books’ bulk and a suspiciously artful drift of loose papers. Classy.

Kaito and Hakuba’s string was gray. By design, not lack of cultivation. It had taken Kaito a little while to notice it had even colored up, but it was a complicated, dove gray, with all sorts of tea brown and gold-glinting-off-of-feathers colors if you really stared at it. Morning light on dove wings, hawk down.

And he was not analyzing that. Not. Analyzing. That.

Hakuba shifted his textbook to free up his novel so he could turn a page very, very quietly.

As Kaito watched Hakuba get a C+ in sneaky and Keiko’s expression continue its creep down from _stressed_ to _despondent_ to _maybe if I fold my worksheets just right I can use them as a gateway to a magical fairy land and never come back_ , the dimmer, thinner string with the brat detective on the other end—looped as low as it could go around his left thumb—swung up and around, sweeping right across Kaito’s vision and crossing over Aoko’s in a quick cat’s cradle. What, was the kid in an airplane or something? Go to school. _Kaito_ has to go to school. _On an algebra review day. All students of Tokyo should suffer with him.  
_

Conan’s string to him was on the _little kid’s_ index finger, which was just rude. Kaito was connected to Inspector Nakamori by his own index, and he didn’t like the _tantei-kun is to Kaito as Kaito is to Nakamori_ comparison at all, because he spent most of his time with Nakamori toying with him and leading him in merry circles. Giving him a purpose in life by night and lying to him over lunch.

...Of course, really, the relevance of finger and position was as good as completely random—basically impossible to determine until after the fact. (People liked to say this lent them a bit of determinism.) Sure, any occult website, living magazine, or lifestyle section would be insistent you could assign specific meanings to hands and fingers, but it was a load of hogwash. Human relationships were just too complicated for that. Even testable factors like physical proximity and progression of relationship strengthened and colored the strings seemingly randomly. Not that you could tell silly magazines that. It didn’t help that all the scientific study of the subject was kind of bullshit, since all data had to be self-reported.

…Kaito still didn’t appreciate the parallel, though.

Didn’t help that the thumb, on his end, was per folk logic the ‘That’s weird, you’re weird,’ finger. What comfort was there to be derived from that?

Weird was _accurate,_ though. Conan was a detective (child or not, it was undeniable, like a, like a _stench_ ), but Kaito didn’t think Conan even really wanted to _catch_ him. He didn’t think the little detective knew _what_ he wanted. He’d been playing a game of catch-and-release a lot lately, in which he cornered Kaito without any backup to speak of and then didn’t try to stop him leaving after he explained how he’d done it. (Detectives were artists, too, and art doesn’t live until it’s observed.) He was possibly also deluding himself into thinking Kaito didn’t notice. And if he wasn’t following that pattern, he was using Kaito like a multitool and then looking guilty about it. The tenuous situation, charged as it was on both sides with manipulation, was all somewhat unsettling coming from a six-year-old.

It wouldn't be so uncomfortable, maybe, except that they weren't even really _friends,_ or much of anything, yet. Conan seemed like the kind of person who let other parties set the terms of his relationships, and Kaito wasn’t quite ready to set those terms. So they were at a stalemate. They bumped into each other with alarming frequency, and then they separated. Sometimes there were unrelated crimes. Kaito got the impression that when he wasn’t around, Conan’s life was like a procedural drama.

As much as they were trying to put off defining things, the powers that be kept crashing them together, and every few encounters the string got a little darker. Kaito could tell it was coming into a stunning sapphire. He could _also_ tell that tantei-kun was having more trouble with every meeting pretending it wasn’t there except in emergencies to play his game of _la la la, let me find you the old-fashioned way_. Kaito was, perversely, going to miss the whole stressful carry on of being tracked down _the old fashioned way_ by the persistent little detective if their string ever got too obvious for the guy to tune it out. It was _especially_ perverse because his attachment to the game was probably hastening that along.

If that happened Kaito wasn’t really sure what Conan, who wasn’t interested in catching-catching him, would do. He kind of suspected he’d start trying harder to avoid heists. Which—which— Which, okay, _wasn’t fair_ , because just the game of cat and mouse was clearly not what they were supposed to _be_ like, or else the tiny meitantei would have a string like Nakamori’s, a.k.a _fucking weird._

With Inspector Nakamori, things had settled into something predictable and normal (by a certain definition). Which was pretty damn ironic. Considering.

He did _not_ look at his index finger at this point, knowing he wouldn’t be able to see the string he knew was there if his very life depended on it. It was only visible sometimes, and only ever at night. He had no idea how it actually worked, but he was glad of it. Personal reports of one’s string weren’t considered legal evidence, but Inspector Nakamori’s declaring that the silver string on his right middle finger had sprung back into mercurial half-existence midway through the Eye of the Moon heist had cemented people’s conviction that the returned Kid was the same thief who had vanished eight years ago. And boy, the old man had had to deal with the third degree all over again, ensuring every remotely interested superior that no, the string wasn’t always there, no, he didn’t know how it worked, no, it never appeared outside a heist, or during the day in general, and _no_ , he could barely track it until it was too late, if ever. And that admission would infuriate him into skipping the rest of the reasoning and yelling the questioner into submission. Nakamori shouting: The bread and butter on which the Kaitou Kid Task Force ran.

The Inspector could curse the Kid and his mysterious, cheating, cockblocking, baby-killing string until he turned blue, but Kaito? Had no idea how it worked either. Word on the street was that that one guy, Lupin III, and _his_ inspector had something like it, but pursuing that lead had been thoroughly unhelpful. His _mother_ seemed to know, but had only been conned into saying, “All in the nature of phantom thieves, my boy! Hoho!” before ending the conversation in her customary abrupt manner.

His mother, as she told it, had only had one connection to one person, ever. And he was dead now.

Kaito was glad he wasn’t like that. Light show or no light show.

The show was rounded out by the thread on his left pinkie, which had been a mystery until it had suddenly turned orange _at a heist_ , because of course it did. He’d had the sort of sad suspicion it was _another_ detective, but then a bit of coordinated stalking revealed it to be one of the fans he’d been talking to under an assumed name on that magician’s message board (surprisingly good intel hub) and, well, he’d wanted to keep talking to her anyway. He’d already been entertaining the notion of staying in touch with her through some means or another. She was _nuts_ ; it was loads of fun.

It was weird not to know one of his connections as himself, but hey, he led a double life. All his strings were weird, and only Aoko got to be mostly in the know. Tantei-kun was canny enough, but too conflicted between desire to leave him hopping along rooftops and obligation to catch him. Uninterested in seriously parleying with a criminal. —Or possibly that was irrelevant, and he just had extreme trust issues. Kaito felt like none of the signals he got from that kid made sense, somehow, but had never been able to put his finger on it. Because he was so bright that he didn’t act like a kid, maybe.

Mom had advised him to drop the Kid thing and go perform in Vegas, but aside from the fact that his mother did not understand about staying in places for people, how could he? Just look at his strings of fate. Two detectives and a police officer trying to catch him, the officer’s daughter, and a fan. Being Kid was all tied up in him.

The bell rang.

 

_Witches don’t have strings, you see,” Akako said. The cold was everywhere, leeching in. His gloves were soaked through, and his hands stung dully with it. “We have to forge our own connections, and we paint red strings with blood.”_

 

Akako didn’t bother coaxing him to the roof, opting to just corner him in the hallway from class. Passersby mysteriously cleared from the general area around them once she zeroed in. Ugh, spooky. Petulantly, he fished two onigiri out of his bag and shoved them into his mouth. He expected that this would cut into the lunch part of lunch.

“Thinking long and hard today, Kaito?” she said, looking at the cords leading from his fingers, one at a time. ( _Creepy, invasive, not the person who’s supposed to be able to look at any of those so don’t —_ )

“Oh, you know me,” he said. “I’m usually thinking about _something._ ”

She kept her eyes on his hands and a light smirk on her face, showing off being so in-the-know. “If any of them are giving you enough trouble to put such a pensive look on your face, maybe I should deal with them for you.” She batted her eyes, then looked at him head on and made serious eye contact. “I can, you know this.”

Kaito felt all the blood drain out of his face in a rush. It tingled, kind of. “You—you wouldn’t,” he said.

A dainty, displeasingly noncommittal shrug. “I nearly have before.”

Kaito choked.

She huffed a breathy sigh, gaze distant. “At the clocktower... I almost severed one of your strings right then and there.”

His heartrate kicked up, like when he was about to force himself that last inch into a controlled dive off a building, and he struggled to say, “What, with Aoko? No, you, you promised you wouldn’t.”

Akako flapped one hand carelessly. “No, of course not. I made a vow, don’t be stupid. With the other one.”

The hyped up feeling slacked off, but only because now he was lost. “The other one what.” Did she think someone _else_ was a rival for his affections, too?

“The hunter,” Akako said, like this was self-explanatory. “The swirling vortex of justice and power. That man was also there.”

“What are...you...” The weirdly accurate police pursuit, the mysterious person in the helicopter. She had to be talking about them.

Akako raised one shoulder; lowered it. “It was a weak, gray thing. Young. You barely would have felt it.” She affected an absent, mysterious face. “If the dice of fate had fallen any differently…” Why was she always saying shit like that?

He hadn’t noticed any of his strings swinging straight up or anything before he “stole” the tower and Aoko went after him.... But that wasn’t really surprising if him and this person had never even properly _met_ and the closest they got to interaction was Helicopter Genius shooting at him. Only that didn’t make any goddamn sense, because he didn’t _have_ any strings unaccounted for to lead out to a mysterious faceless competent person who was scarily good at anticipating his every move. The only person he hadn’t already met by then it could have been was— _Tantei-kun. It was him._

If one of his other connections was there it had to be _that person_ , and if that person was one of his connections they had to be tantei-kun. _“Man”_ indeed. Clearly Akako’s gift of prophecy was kind of hit and miss.

(Wouldn’t he have been like. Five.

_What._

_Was._

_Conan._ )

The kid detective was a huge pain in the ass and a bit scary, which didn’t account for the swooping freefall feeling at the idea of that connection being obliterated before he even _knew_ about it, before he even _met the guy._

“ _Why,_ Akako?” he demanded, voice just a bit rougher than he’d been aiming for. Obscure or inane as it was, she always had a reason, right?

“I thought he was going to—!” She stopped, coughed into her hand, then continued with her eyelids lowered, a cross between demure and haughty. (The way she acted like acting aloof could cover up a moment of passion...the girl was like a cat.) “He almost trapped you like a little mouse,” she said. “You got away that day, but if your relationship had continued along a different path, he could have ended your career. He’s like you, and he’s _dangerous._ You’re both lucky he’s decided he likes playing with you.”

 _Playing...._ Kaito’s eye twitched. He internally stomped down his reaction at what might have been the offensive insinuation that tantei-kun was “like him” somehow, might have been the sparkling idea of being connected to someone like that, or might have been at the yawning abyss of an idea of having that casually taken away, to disassemble later when he wasn’t dealing with his capricious magical piranha of a classmate.

“I just didn’t want him to be the end of you.” She flicked her hair over her shoulder, then smirked at him, accompanying it with a turn of her head for massive damage. It had almost no effect on Kaito, but like, as an observer of body language, he was vaguely aware of what she was going for. “That’s _my_ territory.”

So. This was _less_ disturbing than what he’d thought she was talking about. He very deliberately did not look at his and Aoko’s string.

She noticed anyway, with her damn witchy juju. She chuckled, light and demure. “Don’t worry, _Kai~_ to. I won’t sever your string with your beloved…yet.”

She reached out and _twined the string around her fingers,_ like a vintage gossipy girl with a phone cord. It started up a _thrumming_ sensation somewhere at the back of Kaito’s brain he wasn’t usually aware of—the visual cortex?

Searching for a platform of normality to land on, he said, “We’re just friends.”

Akako eyed the metaphysical manifestation of his and Aoko’s friendship where it was caught around her index finger skeptically. “It’s bright red.”

“It’s _burgundy._ ”

She snorted at him. Of all the cheek. “If you say so,” she said. She slid one finger along it, like a violin virtuoso testing a wire string. “Well, I— Kaito?”

Milky, willow-like fingers slipped free of his and Aoko’s string. Kaito realized he was leaning against the wall. His face felt cold and clammy. The humming sensation slacked off quickly, and only its withdrawal made him realize how encompassing it had been getting, like he’d been trying to listen over the sound of a swarm of humming bees, getting slowly closer until it suddenly stopped.

Akako, to give her some credit, looked horrified. She brought her hand up to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I— I don’t have them, so I forget what it’s like.”

 _No one is supposed to know what that’s like,_ he thought, glaring at her as he got his equilibrium back. _Strings aren’t supposed to be tangible._

She looked away, face flushing, embarrassed.

Kaito sighed. Akako tried to pose as a vamp, but she was really like a hapless puppy who happened to have killer laser vision. Terrifying, but hard to stay mad at.

He spooked her with his fragility, he thought. She was about to go. He should let her, but — he couldn’t help it. “You _really_ don’t have any _at all?_

She looked back over at him through a curtain of hair (as someone who wore wigs sometimes Kaito could endorse this maneuver), then straightened and twitched her shoulders in about a third of a maidenly shrug, expression sporting the aloofness of the defensive. “My powers are from Hell, soulmates are a gift of Heaven. The phenomenon is…averse to me.” She touched her necklace, and for a moment her hair and clothes did that thing where they shifted in a breeze in a room full of still air.

Akako would probably be so useful for finding Pandora if he weren’t terrified of recruiting hell powers. It was an unpleasant train of thought, because he thought he was probably going to have to go to her about destroying the thing if he ever actually did find it. Ugh.

“I’ll go now,” she said. “But remember what I said, okay?” She reached out to grasp his arm, hovered her hand in the air instead before she could touch him, withdrew it and clasped her hands in front of her instead, unintentionally girlish. She leveled a look at him, then turned and strode away, too brisk to be as calm as she was trying to look.

Yep. Terrifying.

Akako had nearly committed an ultimate taboo in a fit of misguided protectiveness. Kaito bit down hysterical giggles.

He levered himself off of the wall. Okay. All systems seemed normal. Time to go back to class.

**Author's Note:**

> Showcasing everybody's class habits turned this whole fic into a tag yourself meme. Tag yourself, I'm Hakuba.


End file.
